FRANCE: NGO Gets Court's Nod to Continue Anti-Personnel Mines
PARIS, Dic 21 (IPS) - A French pressure group running a nationwide public opinion drive against anti-personnel mines, won a court battle Wednesday against an arms manufacturer who had sought to put an end to the campaign.
Jean-Marie Fardeau, secretary-general of the pressure group Agir Ici (Act Here) said the court decision would give a strong boost to their efforts to obtain a ban on the production, stockpiling, trade, and use of landmines.
Agir Ici's campaign is part of an international movement launched by French, German, U.S. and British non-governmental organisations and supported by UNICEF to secure a total ban on what anti-mines critics have called "weapons of cowards".
The international campaign is seeking to influence the ongoing U.N. review of the 1980 Landmines Protocol that critics say is routinely ignored and has not helped curb the use of the particularly devastating and ignoble weapon of war.
The United Nations estimates that 100 million landmines remain uncleared in the world, mostly in developing countries, preventing people from making economic use of their land or living on it. Conceived to repel the enemy, mines also injure and kill non- combatants. According to the estimates, 780 people are wounded every month and 1,400 killed.
Unlike other military weapons, landmines can remain lying on or buried in the ground undetected but lethal for years after the war had ended. They explode when women, children and non-combatants wandering into the fields looking for firewood, fetching water or simply playing step on them or get too close.
In 10 years of work in Cambodia alone, Handicap International, one of the NGOs to get involved in the campaign, said it has counted at least 15,000 who have lost their limbs after unknowingly causing mines to explode. Other countries badly infested by mines include Afghanistan, Angola, Iraq (especially Iraqi Kurdistan), Kuwait, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia.
Work by NGOs like Handicap International is just beginning in Rwanda, also badly spiked by the former army to hamper the advance of the then rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
Mines are in widespread use in developing countries because they are inexpensive. Some can be bought for around five francs (less than one dollar) apiece.
© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service